> The problem has been hashed over quite a bit recently, and I would be> curious what you would consider the real problem after you see the> situation.> > The root cause boils down to with git, gitweb and the normal mirroring> on the frontend machines our basic working set no longer stays resident> in memory, which is forcing more and more to actively go to disk causing> a much higher I/O load. You have the added problem that one of the> frontend machines is getting hit harder than the other due to several> factors: various DNS servers not round robining, people explicitly> hitting [git|mirrors|www|etc]1 instead of 2 for whatever reason and> probably several other factors we aren't aware of. This has caused the> average load on that machine to hover around 150-200 and if for whatever> reason we have to take one of the machines down the load on the> remaining machine will skyrocket to 2000+. > > Since it's apparent not everyone is aware of what we are doing, I'll> mention briefly some of the bigger points.> > - We have contacted HP to see if we can get additional hardware, mind> you though this is a long term solution and will take time, but if our> request is approved it will double the number of machines kernel.org> runs.

Would you accept help from someone else than HP? kernel.org is veryimportant, and hardware is cheap these days... What are therequirements for machine to be interesting to kernel.org? I guessAMD/1GHz, 1GB ram, 100GB disk is not interesting to you....